The NY Times headlined a piece a few years ago: “End of Banking as We Know It.” Great lead! Gretchen Morgenson said: “The money business as we have come to know it over the last two decades – with its lush salaries, big-swinging risk-takers, and ultrathin capital cushions – is a goner. Got that? Toast. Toe-tagged.”[i]
I got it. I agree. I would go one step further. I would say: “The end of business, management, work, jobs, and careers as we know it.” All careers are going through epochal changes. The Wall Street financial meltdown is a paradigm shift – something we haven’t seen in almost 80 years. The economy slogs along with high unemployment. One of the critical things I’ve seen is that when there’s a paradigm shift, work, career, and job rules change over night.
New paradigms destroy the existing rules and create a new order or set of rules. Today’s killer idea is often tomorrow’s has been. The old idea, principle, process, system, or product is trashed because it’s too difficult to implement, it costs too much to implement, people don’t understand it, or for a host of other reasons. Our perception of success, worth, and confidence of who we are, what we do, and how we work changes.
Change is inherent in all paradigm shifts. Change distorts our perceptions of our life and work. Change can distort our reality – the ‘is’ of what is happening around us. Change is distressing. We then react according to our false perceptions of the ‘is’, which if distorted by old assumptions or rules and how we respond to our work, career, and job. This results in a vicious cycle.
Life Lesson Earned: Acknowledge your old ‘is’ has changed and now you need to deal with the ‘as is’ or what ‘can be’ of your new work, career, and job realities. Even things that were iron-clad promises such as promotions, work, and even pensions may disappear.